Chapter 1 #2
Within minutes, the notifications would start. Comments, questions, theories, the occasional troll. I couldn’t afford the distraction, not while I was driving. The Kombi demanded attention. One moment of reading some stranger’s hot take, and I’d end up as someone else’s true crime story.
After a few hours, I left the highway for the coast road, trading high-speed traffic and massive trucks that dwarfed my Kombi for some of the most beautiful stretches of asphalt in the country.
And I should know. I’d been traveling these roads for ten years, never staying anywhere long enough for people to start asking questions like: What’s a woman your age doing living out of a van?
Don’t you have family? A home? A normal life?
The answers were simple: I didn’t want those things. Didn’t need them.
The Kombi was enough. The road was enough.
The truth was all that mattered.
My Kombi was distinctive though. Soft teal color, 1974 model, with a Starlink dish mounted on the roof.
I’d thought about repainting it a dozen times in the last couple of months, making it less recognizable, but I kept putting it off.
Stupid. Sentimental. It had been Celeste’s dream to road-trip Australia in a Kombi just like this one.
All I needed was the Starlink dish and my phone and laptop to do my podcasts and the romance book editing work I did that actually paid my bills. I had no reason to stay anywhere, which was either the loneliest statement or the freest, depending on the day.
Most days I told myself I was free.
Most days it was a lie.
When Aria Morgan from Wolf Security had called me out of the blue and asked me to help expose Bob Ackerman, the crooked cop on the run, I’d known something was off the second she asked.
Cases like that went through police media liaisons, not true crime podcasters.
But Aria had chosen me anyway. We’d worked together before, and she trusted me.
I’d followed every rule she gave me, down to the letter. That was a trust I would never break.
And ever since I’d pulled into a picnic stop in Port Douglas and, with my heart hammering, pressed go on that single eighty-eight-minute episode, my Avenging Angel numbers had lit up like a bushfire.
A set of headlights swung onto the road behind me.
The car sat back a good way and held its distance. White, I thought, though the sunlight was going and I couldn’t be sure.
Probably nothing. People drove this road. That was allowed.
I kept one eye on the mirror anyway and let my mind drift to the thing it had been circling since I released the podcast that had changed how I slept.
Because a man like Bob didn’t run a criminal network for over forty years on his own.
He’d had people in his pocket. People he owned.
Other cops. Councilors. Judges. Men he met in the back rooms of pubs.
People who feared him or found him useful.
Only a handful had been named. Even fewer had been caught. Just one was already serving time.
Nobody knew how many people Senior Sergeant Bob Ackerman had murdered or corrupted. Aria and her team were working through cases that spanned his forty-year career, and now he was a wanted man, hiding somewhere out there in a country big enough to swallow a person whole.
My podcast had focused on a girl named Kat.
She’d been seventeen when Bob, Frank, and a third man known only as Donny killed her and buried her in a cave on that outback cattle station.
They’d buried her body under a rusty forty-gallon drum, the kind station hands use for everything from water troughs to campfire cooking.
For nearly fifty years, they’d lit fires in that drum to cook their sausages over the spot where she lay.
That one detail had drawn more comments than anything else I’d ever aired.
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel.
Kat had been their first murder.
She was not their last.
Eight hundred thousand people subscribed to my podcast, and that one episode had pulled six million views and a flood of interview requests from people who’d never once thought about the ethics of true crime until there was a trending hashtag in it. #GirlUnderTheDrum.
The car was still behind me.
Same distance. My neck hair prickled, and I tried to read its license plate so I could turn the letters into a saying I could remember. Except I couldn’t get the plate. Too far. Too dark.
“Cut it out, Angel,” I told myself.
This was exactly why I never showed my face on any form of media. I’d barely turned my phone on since the episode aired, and I hadn’t posted a photo of me anywhere since my sister died eleven years ago.
Nobody knew the real Angel, just the Avenging Angel, a voice and nothing more.
I was a single thirty-four-year-old woman who wore T-shirts and jeans, lived out of a Kombi while editing romance books for a steady income and cut her own hair with kitchen scissors, so my face was not important for my stories.
I’d learned that at twenty-three, in the worst classroom there was, watching a journalist turn my sister’s murder into a ratings spike and my family into a sideshow.
The headlights slowed. Indicated. Peeled off down a side road and were gone.
“Ridiculous,” I said to the empty Kombi. Just a person going home. Months of looking over my shoulder and now I was jumping at car lights.
I made myself think of something steadier.
Sapphire Delaney came to mind. She was a cop who was forced to hand in her badge after Bob wrecked her career, and who now worked cold cases as a freelance investigator under Parker Callahan, a Rosebud detective.
Aria had connected us when she’d handed me Bob’s story, knowing we’d understand each other. And we did.
Since that episode dropped, Sapphire had called me every couple of days. No agenda. She just wanted to know I was holding up, because she knew better than almost anyone what it cost to stand between a man like Bob and the truth.
We were the same that way. Two women who’d been ruined by a ruthless man, but we had refused to give him the last word.
Dusk was painting the sky in brilliant gold and pomegranate colors as I turned off the main road after the sign for Rosebud. The road switched back on itself, over and over, before I finally reached the coastline. My chest squeezed, just like it did every single time I saw the ocean.
I drove for miles, all alone on the winding road, wishing my thoughts would piss off for a while.
The road clung to the cliffs, a rock wall rising on my right and the ocean falling away on my left, the asphalt carved into the headland like a ledge. The road wound around in a run of tight bends, each one swinging me out toward the water and back again.
Needing a break, I slowed for the next bend and pulled into a small gravel rest area on the outer edge of the road, a shallow shelf scraped out over the drop with a battered guardrail strung along its lip.
With the headlights pointed at the sea, I stopped a few feet from the guardrail and looked out over the slow swell of the Pacific, turning a deep bruised blue as the day gave up its light.
Deciding I’d stay to watch the sunset, I turned the engine off and killed the headlights. I undid my seatbelt, rolled down my window, and fresh sea breezes washed into the Kombi.
I always hoped a delicate ocean breeze was the last thing Celeste felt before she died. And not the coarse rope that had strangled her to death.
I turned on the fairy lights and in the gathering dark, the string of lights glowed soft and warm along the inside of the van.
My little homage to Celeste always made my heart ache.
She loved pretty things. Flowers, makeup, candles, frilly dresses, and fairy lights.
She’d string them up everywhere. I was the opposite.
Jeans. Doc Martens boots. No makeup, not even lipstick, and definitely not candles.
I reached up and slid Celeste’s photo out from behind the sun visor.
“Got the fairy lights on, Sis.”
My sister rode shotgun with me up and down the length of the country. Forever eighteen, grinning at the camera on a Sunshine Coast beach, squinting into the sun as her long blonde hair danced around her face.
“Hey, CeeCee,” I said.
I’m not embarrassed that I talk to her. The dead don’t mind, and the living don’t have to know.